


Picture perfect regret

by Akrois



Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén, Fallen Hero: Rebirth (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, all the pairings are intend at, help your friend deal with their sadness by talking about strippers! (it makes sense i swear!), i just have feelings, it's just four pages of sadness, no beta we die like men, you can see them, you just need to squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:15:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21828064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akrois/pseuds/Akrois
Summary: You need to be strong.Ricardo smiles and nods and starts doing your buttons up.There's a handful of seconds of blessed silence, where all you can hear is breathing and the sound of cloth moving around.It's peaceful.Anathema would be making a joke now, something that would make Ortega laugh and maybe, just maybe, make you smile. Sidestep would chime in with something witty and mildly offensive and you would firmly, but politely, tell him where to shove his opinions.You need to be a rock in the waterfall, an island in the ocean.Be strong.
Relationships: Ortega/Chen (Fallen Hero), Ortega/Sidestep (Fallen Hero), Steel/Sidestep (Fallen Hero)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 32





	Picture perfect regret

**Author's Note:**

> It's been like six years since I managed to write a full story of any kind. Literally, I couldn't even manage a one-shot. biggest writer block of my life.  
> But then I played Fallen Hero: Rebirth on a plane and I  
> I have so many feelings  
> and I managed to belt out this thing in one sitting and I'm very proud of this mess that is full of adverbs and Grammarly hates adverbs but I love them, okay?
> 
> Also, English is not my first language and this story was checked in two different grammar apps but there could still be errors.  
> I have no beta and I'm all alone with these feelings  
> also, funny thing, I couldn't sort out the Html code for the story so I used this old trick of saving the document as an HTML page and copypaste the page source code which worked but messed up the spacing? but I'm tired and I'll sort it out another day  
> also some of the weird spacing is on purpose because I miss the times where fanfiction would look like futurist manifestos
> 
> Addendum: this story plays really fast and loose with the timeline and the game's canon and I have zero excuses for it
> 
> ENJOY!

  


  


  


  


Life has a disconcerting tendency to move on. You suffer and you lose everything and then you look up and notice that the world just kept on turning.

That the sky still turns blue and red and black and then it's blue again.

That the things that once where storms surrounding you now only exist in the background, like the humming of a machine. There forever, but subdued, softer, nearly imperceptible until it's nigh-time and it's quiet and every hum and whisper is suddenly a scream in your hears, a cacophony that keeps you tossing and turning until exhaustion finally takes you.

And then you wake up.

And life goes on.

  


  


You know loss better than anyone. You lost so much, scars on your body and scars inside your mind, faces haunting your dreams and the face staring at you in the mirror.

You wish you could just

say something.

But words were never something you could use just right. Words where slippery and the phrases you should have said hang in your mind, half-sentences of appreciation, of friendship, of

love.

  


  


You stand in the locker room, too stiff fingers struggling once again.

Just an issue with texture mapping, you tell yourself. An issue of sensory input, the fake nerves unable to mingle properly with yours, past and present struggling to connect.

You tell yourself many things. You always did.

It has always been a strength, the ability to justify the world you lived in, to use your rational mind to make the absurd palatable. To strip it down to its bare bones and find the thread of reason that would keep you going until the next tornado, the next bomb, the next attack

the next casualty.

It has nothing to do with Ricardo standing next to you, staring blankly at a locker that was never officially anyone's, that never held a uniform or a change of clothes.

The person that used it didn't change in that locker room.

Zachary never changed with you and Ortega (and Anathema). He would appear in his suit and disappear in his suit, no matter how wounded he was, no matter how many times Ricardo asked him to just see the doctor, to go out to have dinner to

stay.

But. The locker. He did use it, for tools and trinkets and assorted garbage that always made your nose itch a bit. You argued with him about it, but Ricardo (and Anathema) would always have his side.

_ Leave him be _ , they would say,  _ it's his locker _ .

But it wasn't. Not really.

You saw the tools and trinkets. Cheap, replaceable. Nothing worth holding onto. Things that he could leave behind and repurchase if needed. Nothing to anchor him to this place. To them.

To you(?).

  


  


“ Need help?”

  


Ricardo's voice sounds like it came from across the sea and maybe it did.

He walks up to you and smiles and it would look so nice, a friendly smile and trousered hair: if only his eyes weren't so blank, if only his face wasn't so grey if only he looked like Ricardo and less like an unwatered garden, brown thorns and fruits left to rot.

  


“Yes.”

  


No need to hide or lie. You'll rip this shirt off if you keep going and you don't even care about it but you just

want this to be normal.

You want what once was, what you never thought you would miss and it scares you because regret is cruel and rips everything away and you can't let it do that. You need to be whole.

You need to be strong.

Ricardo smiles and nods and starts doing your buttons up.

There's a handful of seconds of blessed silence, where all you can hear is breathing and the sound of cloth moving around.

It's peaceful.

Anathema would be making a joke now, something that would make Ortega laugh and maybe, just maybe, make you smile. Sidestep would chime in with something witty and mildly offensive and you would firmly, but politely, tell him where to shove his opinions.

You need to be a rock in the waterfall, an island in the ocean.

Be strong.

Ortega is not moving, but his hands are holding on the button just under your diaphragm and his head is down. You look at him, puzzled. He smiles a miserable, horrible simulacrum of a smile.

  


“ Zachary used to do this, remember?”

  


You remember.

Zachary would sit around and watch you for a while and then he would stand up and hold his hands up. An offer.

You remember watching his scarred hands and chewed up nails (the nail of his left thumb always a bit shorter than the one on the right) deftly moving on your shirt, quick and efficient.

He would be silent. He never joked about your mods, nor really. It was always  _ your _ hands and  _ your _ legs, even when you threw a hand at him and he used it to high-five himself because there was no way you would've high-fived him otherwise.

You remember how he used to do your buttons up, gently fixing your collar and then sliding his hands on your chest, the touch always perfunctory, just to smooth a wrinkle, to fix something you couldn't see.

Then he would say something

  


“He did.”

“He was good that way, wasn't he? Always there to help.”

“He was.”

  


he would say something witty and mildly offensive, something on the line of  _ go get them tiger _ or  _ look at you, you handsome devil _ or  _ alas, it's like putting a pearl necklace on a bear _ .

It always made Anathema laugh and Ricardo would turn around, mock shock hiding his mirth and say something to chastise him. Nothing that would make him stop doing that, but you did appreciate the effort.

But you knew exactly what it was.

It was an olive branch, a white flag. It was his way to let you jump back into your boots, climb back onto your high ground. A way to let you hide the burning shame that came with the inability to do something as simple as dressing yourself.

You were grateful.

  


“He was just. So nice. And so funny. And, ”

“Ricardo.”

“he had this way of smiling like he didn't want to but couldn't help it and”

“Don't”

“I spoke to him so many times and said so many words but”

“Please”

“never the ones that mattered.”

  


Ricardo is trembling.

You regret letting him come back but you know that keeping him out would have been worse for him. Emptiness can be a man's worst enemy, so easy to fill with danger and anger and grief and

pain.

You want to tell him something. Something kind, something helpful. Something about Zachary watching over him or how the words he said or didn't say were nothing, that love is shown and not said.

You want to say that Zachary was a stray cat that came round because someone was feeding him and stayed for love. Love he showed in his own way, love that Ricardo didn't see because he never really understood the quiet love of silence and presence (otherwise he would have known  _ about it _ ).

_Love_ , you want to say, _was what kept him at your side_. And

Zachary's face in your memory is suddenly morphed into the one in the pictures, his eyes wide open and the look in them

_ horror _ .

You wonder what he saw. What monsters waited for him at the end of the fall, what scared him more than villains and nano-machines and explosions.

You wonder what scared him more than death itself.

  


“He was a good man. He was your friend.”

“I was in”

“He is dead.”

  


Ricardo stands still, even the trembling stops.

Regret sinks it's claws in your chest, makes you want to take those words back, but you can't and you don't want to. It's been so long.

The Rangers need him back. The city needs him back. You need him back.

You need Ricardo back and he needs to work through his grief or it's going to eat him alive and leave you alone with one more face to haunt you and nobody left to do you buttons.

You're selfish that way.

  


“I know, just”

“He would want you to go on.”

“Zachary? He's probably sitting somewhere pissed off because I didn't spend his funeral ripping my hair out and rolling on the floor.”

“You punched a reporter.”

“Bastard had it coming”

“Zachary would have loved it.”

  


Ricardo laughs. It's thin and fragile like cracked glass, held together just by the will to be.

But it's a laugh.

  


“He wanted strippers.”

“The funeral director refused to have the outrageous amount of strippers they wanted.”

“ _ They _ ?”

“Anathema also wanted strippers.”

“Wait, are you saying that the director would have been okay with a  _ moderate _ amount of strippers?”

“I never said that.”

“But you did ask him!”

  


He sounds delighted and for a second he's just the Ricardo you remember and you can nearly hear Anathema chortling from his locker and Zachary screaming that he wanted a clown and fireworks too.

Ricardo starts to button up your shirt again.

He's smiling, a brittle little thing but, but it's the closest thing to happiness you've seen on his face in a while.

The closest thing to normal in a while.

  


“There. You okay with the rest of your clothes?”

“I can zip a pair of pants.”

“Or I can do that for you.”

  


He waggles his eyebrows and you huff and send him to get prepared. There's an interview to do and people to meet and hands to shake.

He will crawl to his psychologist after this, maybe cry a bit. Maybe he will end up at his mother's place and sleep curled up on her couch or by her side and maybe he'll soon be the one you knew once.

  


  


When Ricardo turns around, you remember Zachary smiling up at you, running his hands down your chest and

_ look at you, you handsome devil _

you remember how  ** not ** handsome you'd look. With only your shirt and boxers, you looked more like a broken store mannequin held up on a pair of sticks.

You remember a retort, something to get you back in your boots, to give you the high ground

you remember his mask, rolled over his forehead, the mole under his left eye, his cracked lips split in a smile that made you

stand still and look at him, waiting for a tell, for a twitch for anything that would make it feel like a joke, a lie. Something witty and mildly offensive.

Most of the times you got it. Most of the time he would snicker and saunter off and you would just chunk a rolled-up sock at him or you would tell him where to shove his opinion (firmly, but politely).

Until one time

one time where he just blushed and looked down, biting his lower lip before he shuffled away like a rejected child, hiding behind the door of his locker.

You remember your mouth feeling dry, swallowing sand, a warm tendril of something in your chest, the skin tingling his hands touched the fabric.

  


  


  


Ricardo is getting dressed behind you and you lower your head and look at your hands and

regret is such a terrible, terrible thing

  


  


  


  


  



End file.
